Norway has had incredibly generous electric car subsidies. This has meant that the number of people changing to electric cars are so high that the tax from gas guzzlers is falling faster than they anticipated. Electric cars are already 77.5% of new cars sold. This compares to the UK at 15% of new cars being electric, and the USA 2.6%. I find the USA particularly strange as they are the country which has lead to the rise of Tesla- though admittedly given the rise speed that tesla has been growing, this is probably out of date. With tesla, if the numbers are just 3 years out of date the number of deliveries has trebled (if you look back to 2013, only 8 years, there is only 20,000 sales, yet in 2021 936,000 were sold 4700% growth in 8 years).
Continue reading “Is Norway having problems funding their country without combustion engine cars”Worldwide fossil fuel subsidies last year were $5.9 trillion!
Perhaps a more alarming way of looking at this, worldwide fossil fuel subsidies last year were $11 million a minute.
Just think what that amount of money could do for mitigating climate change and reversing the damage on the natural world.
Continue reading “Worldwide fossil fuel subsidies last year were $5.9 trillion!”Is travel back on hold?
Just a few days I put up an article talking about how tourism could start up again particularly in places like Africa.
It would appear that the omicron variant of Covid is going to make that sound very premature.
Pfizer is predicting boosters will protect populations from this new variant within 100 days.
Assuming that it doesn’t start spreading Europe out of control, this would allow any traveller to be vaccinated before they leave.
My family are booked to go to the Kruger national park in South Africa next August. I am confident that we will still go -assuming restrictions lift as things improve. Unfortunate comments from health representatives in South Africa about premature banning of travel do seem rather foolish, however in terms of wealth South Africa is on different category to pretty much all of the countries in Africa and are likely to be able to get a grip on this relatively rapidly. While it is true that South Africa has had more cases of covid than anywhere else on the continent, their numbers of dramatically lower than the UK’s (and virtually all other European Nations).
In short, well this is an unfortunate second blow on the travel industry in southern Africa my hope is that it will be short enough lived that it will do far less damage to the natural world in this part of Africa than the first one did.
An American kingfisher has turned up in the uk
This Kingfisher is thought to have been blown across the Atlantic during an ocean storm. Indeed there have only been a few records of this bird in the UK in the last century. Usually migrating between the USA and Caribbean/Mexico each year, they are not birds that are expected to regularly fly the Atlantic. It is the fifth occasion since 1908 that one has been seen here. Of more interest to “twitchers” this is the first time that one has hung around for any length of time, having been first spotted in October. It is also even rarer, as it is only the second sighting beyond the isles of Scilly or Cornwall, where they usually first make land (it is currently living in Lancashire).
It appears to have found an area that is good for it to live in, and due to its size it cant hide easily so continues to be spotted regularly. Given its size and lack of any knowledge about migrating across the Atlantic, it may well live out its life here. Whether it will start migrating into Europe is anyones guess.
What is the actual population of the Iberian wolf?
Across the world many governments make money by allowing hunters to take a certain percentage of their population each year. In most countries this percentage is worked out carefully, so as to not damage the population in the long run.
Wolves continue to spread across France
It has been confirmed! An animal seen in Calvados, France was a male wolf. They have not been seen in this part of France for over 100 years.
Sainsbury has stopped selling all or some beef from Brazil along with 5 others
In Brazil, one of the main drivers of deforestation is for pasture for beef. It is therefore completely foolish for those in developed countries to eat Brazilian beef – if we do, we are paying them to do the world (and therefore us) incalculable harm.
Importantly, these people can wait. If we have a moratorium on grazing on newly deforested land, the land owner can wait a few years or a decade then its value jumps. This move was taken after it became clear that “cattle laundering” was going on.
First millipede to fully justify the name has been found
Millipede (if you want to be precise) is a name that cannot fairly be ascribed to any previous millipedes! Millipede means “thousand feet”, which means that all previous millipedes do not deserve the name. The “millipede with the most legs before this animal was a Californian millipede species with 750 legs.
The new species has been named Eumilipes Persephone had grows to about 95mm long, and has more than 1306 legs along its body. You are unlikely to stumble on this creature as it was found almost 60m under ground in Australia.
The animals scientific name means true thousand feet. As with most animals that live below the surface, the animal is colourless and without eyes. It is thought that it only eats fungi. Leg number does not appear to be a constant, with other specimens having 998, 818 and 778 legs.
This new species joins a list of more than 13,000 different species. Millipedes are an ancient lineage going back 400 million years. It is thought that millipedes were the first land living species.
Google profited from climate change deniers despite promising not to
” DO NO HARM” is googles motto, yet they are failing. It is quite true that google cannot police the whole internet. It is also true, that we should not expect it to. However, we can expect it to not advertise or direct traffic to mistruths.
Yet, they have been placing ads next to content promoting climate change denial.
There are 10 fringe publishers who’s content is included in 69% of false posts on the climate – this number is small enough that google should be able to deal with it. It is estimated that google made $5.3 million in just 6 months from google ad revenue (according to the CCDH).
Climate change denial seeks to push off the time when we will have to make the hard changes, yet this makes the ecological disaster we are trying to avoid all the more likely.
In 2019 more than 11,000 scientists from more than 150 countries declared a climate emergency. The problem is that this was followed by the whole world closing down because of COVID. It seems that google has been helping spread misinformation.
When this challenge was put to google, it basically pointed at its policy and then stopped serving adds on the page in question. This is not good enough. Google can well afford a handful of people searching the web for content of this sort, and making sure that they do not profit from it. It is likely that there will always be people who refuse to believe the planet is warming (there are still so called “flat earth” societies around the world)
Could Bialowlieza forest be destroyed by forests on borders?
Around the world we are in a period where there are lots of people struggling where they are. Whether due to weather or war or crime, there are significant numbers of people who are on the move. Perhaps the most famous is the border wall that Donald Trump ran on. Given that almost all of the people who are illegally in the USA arrive legally and then fail to leave, cutting off the stream of people fleeing violent crime in central America will make little difference to what is going on.
